Archive for April 2015

For all my good intentions, I still don’t go out stargazing as often as I did in the years before I launched into self-publishing. It’s hard to justify spending time on a hobby when there are so many stories trying to claw their way out of my head. But the night sky can be insistent, and the urge can become overwhelming. A few days ago it became irresistible.

It was a clear evening, typical of the desert in springtime. The constellations of winter, Orion most prominent among them, were low in the west and slipping away. Sirius blazed and glittered in the southwest. Gemini was high in the west, and Leo was straight overhead with Jupiter just within reach of his paws. The arrangement of planet and constellation brought to mind a kitten chasing a toy, a strange fate for the King of Planets. Rising in the east were the constellations of spring and early summer. Boötes was almost horizontal, as if not quite ready to rise and shine from a long seasonal sleep. The Big Dipper was high in the northeast, and the North Star was, well, where you always find it. Plenty to choose from, in terms of targets, even with the narrow bit of sky I can see from the backyard these days.

In 2003, when I bought the new telescope and began to re-educate myself in the art and science of visual astronomy, setting up on the back porch was a workable option. I lost some of the north and northwest sky to the mesquites growing in the back yard, but there were only a handful of constellations I couldn’t reach. In the years since, the trees have responded to our care by doing what trees do best – growing. Twelve years later, setting up on the back porch leaves me with somewhat limited observing options, which has regrettably discouraged me from observing from home base. That night I was reminded that even a narrow slice of an infinite universe is a busy place.

Using a four-inch refractor under moderately light-polluted skies requires careful target selection. No galaxy hopping this time ‘round; I needed bright lights in the night sky. I went for familiar double stars and spent a lot of time looking at Venus and Jupiter. It was a cool, quiet evening that started out a bit windy, but settled to mere whispers of a breeze. The atmosphere was fairly steady, what astronomers call “good seeing.” The twinkling of stars that you sometimes see, famed in song and nursery rhyme, is actually a bad thing for stargazers. If I’d been able to look up that night and honestly recite “twinkle twinkle, little star,” I’d have gone back in to work on the next book. That didn’t happen, so I gazed the evening away, and was satisfied the time was well spent. If you’re at all moved by the sight of stars, just being out on a clear night will do it for you. I spent as much time seated and looking up, eyes alone, as I did at the eyepiece, relaxed and unworried for a while by recent events.

The Muse, however, is never silent, and for all that I focused my attention on Castor and Pollux, Mizar and Alcor, and the moons of Jupiter, the current work in progress was ever present. Bits of dialogue crept into my thoughts. An idea for resolving a plot wrinkle came to mind. Notes for the book appeared among the observing notes regarding the ruddy gold double star in Leo designated Gamma Leonis. The Muse nudged, but it was gently done, for a change, something always there, but otherwise leaving me at peace under that slice of the night sky. A fact of life, if you’re a writer. It never really stops. I felt no conflict between writing and stargazing as this went on, and that’s likely because amateur astronomy is such a blend of knowledge and imagination. Objects in the night sky are utterly beyond my grasp, and so I can only look at them with my eyes or a telescope, touching them with my thoughts alone. I consider what I’ve read about these things, about how long a star in a double system takes to orbit its companion, about the stars being born in that patch of light beneath Orion’s belt, and they assume a reality of sorts for all that they are far beyond my physical reach.

Telling a tale is much the same thing. The worlds I’ve invented are as unreachable, in their way, as the stars. They are built of knowledge and imagination, but they are real in my imagination, as real as the Orion nebula, because I have what I need, through a lifetime of reading and living, to make them seem tangible. And so it seems perfectly natural that, as I look up at the stars, I take their measure even as I imagine people living out there and having adventures. Stars and stories go together and always have, and I am hardly the first to be moved to tell tales while seated beneath them.

If you give a daydream a long enough leash it will become a story. If you let go of the leash, it’ll run away from you and find someplace suitable to thrive and grow. If you’re a writer, you have no choice but to follow it to that place.

There’s rarely a clear-cut trail that leads you to where the stray daydream finally comes to rest. You have to blaze the trail for yourself, even if the daydream left you with only a vague idea of which way to go. The process of bushwhacking your way to the destination the daydream-story has created is called writing the first draft.

Most writers I know face their greatest challenges while revising and editing a book. Some go so far as to proclaim anything from distaste for, to outright hatred of, this aspect of writing. For me, it’s just the opposite. The first draft puts the grey in my beard. Once I’ve got the first draft done the real fun begins. The trail to what that daydream became is open. The route to the destination that is the story’s ending can now be followed and reshaped to reach its greatest potential. That’s the destination I have in mind when I begin the journey that becomes a book. Once I’ve cut the trail to this place, I can set up camp and go back along the trail to clean it up. After all, I do want others to follow me. This is more easily said than done, so I can understand to a degree why some people feel the way they do, but for me this particular challenge is what it’s all about. As my Kentucky great-grandmother liked to say, “It isn’t work if you enjoy it!”

But I have to get there first, and establishing the trail head itself is the biggest challenge involved with blazing that trail. It isn’t unusual for me to start a project, get a chapter or two into it, and realize I’m headed in the wrong direction. When that feeling of having gone astray begins to develop, and I recognize it all too well, there’s nothing for it. I back up and start over. I may incorporate some of what I’ve written somewhere along the line, mostly by keeping the ideas in play, but I might start completely from scratch. Even after I’ve worked out of a false start and gained momentum, I very often find that the real trail head was some ways off from where I thought I needed to begin. It’s not unusual for me to cut out the very first chapter of a book when preparing it for beta readers. Sometimes the biggest mess of all is the trail head itself, and a better one needs to be found. So let’s say we start the journey by strolling down the hillside, instead of jumping awkwardly off that rocky outcrop.

You don’t make a journey like this alone, of course. Right from the start there’s going to be a character or two at the trail head with you. The characters that inhabit the daydream are, at this point, mere sketches. I know I need a man here, or a woman there, along with a situation that allows me to set their identities and begin the process of character building. I start out with a fair idea of who these companions are, and what they’re about, but as I cut my way through the wilderness and get to know them better, I often find out I’m wrong. They change with the journey, and that’s as it should be. Experience should show, and the best characters in fiction are always those who are at least a little different in the end from who and what they were in the beginning. Sometimes you learn more about them than you wanted to know, but in the end, the story is the stronger for it.

You don’t come at this task barehanded, of course. You need the proper tools to cut through the undergrowth and then clear the trail. The daydream spun itself out of who and what you are in the first place, and you are the sum total of all your experiences. Everything I’ve ever done, seen, heard, and felt; everything I touch or taste; every pain and exaltation, and all the people I’ve met and either cared about or despised; every book I’ve read – especially the books – all come ready to hand as the trail grows ever longer. Even the research I do is based on what I already know, which provides the frame of reference for the questions the story raises as I work my way to the trail’s end. And yes, I sometimes find myself shaping the right tool for the job and giving it the sharpest possible edge even while I work.

Now and then, from some high place along the way, I can see something of what’s ahead. That’s useful when it happens, so I always take notes! It often looks strangely familiar, even though I’ve never really passed this way before. But then, it was my own daydream, after all.